The Bride (The Bride #1)(33)

Yeah. She was. I didn’t say it because I thought it would make me sound like a jerk, but regardless of what weirdness was happening now between us, Ellie and I were solid.

We were family.

For another one hundred and eighteen days at least.



*

“Can I ask you a question?”

It was late. We were driving home from the party. I could tell she was drunk on punch and eggnog. It was ruthless of me really, but I thought it might be the best way to get to the truth with her defenses a little down.

“Go for it,” she said. She was twisted a little in her seat, on her side and looking at me, smiling.

“Did you have fun tonight?”

“I did.”

She said it like it was a surprise.

“Is that because you’re hopped up on punch?”

“Yes,” she laughed. “No. It was nice to be around… people who know us. Who get us. Who don’t think we’re weird.”

“Ellie,” I had to tell her. “We’re weird.”

“I know. Even the way we showed up at the party. Me with a bottle of wine. You driving and being all manly. Like we were some normal married couple celebrating Christmas with the neighbors.”

“Do you think of us that way?” I asked it gently because I knew this was poking into a sensitive area.

“No,” she answered quickly. “I know we’re not. We are so not a couple.”

“You’ve been acting a little different with me lately, and I wanted to make sure…”

Now she was tilting away from me. “Make sure what?”

“Ellie, are you really ready for April? For the divorce. Because it’s going to happen. I can’t see any way around that.”

She nodded. “I know. I’m ready for it. I want you to have your chance. You’ve worked so hard this year to make my place a success and to teach me everything you know, you deserve to be able to put all that work into something of your own. I know you have to go and do that.”

“I’m not dying, you know. I’m going ten miles south, remember?”

Again a nod, only she was looking out the window, not at me.

Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe this had nothing to do with a crush or seeing my dick or any of it. Maybe she was pulling away because she was scared about being on her own.

“Talk to me, Ellie. What are you thinking?”

She leaned her head back. “Sometimes it just hits me. I’m really all alone.”

That made me immediately angry. “You’re not. You’re always going to have me.”

She looked at me then, her smile gone, and I could see it in her eyes. All the sorrow and weight of her grief had changed her. Made her older, made her wiser. I missed goofy Ellie, but serious Ellie was a woman to be reckoned with.

“I’m not, Jake. I’m not always going to have you. And you, you are not always going to have me. I think we need to realize that. We think April twenty-second isn’t going to change anything, but it is. We should start preparing for that now.”

I didn’t say anything. How could I when I was essentially trying to get to the same point. Of course I had been worried about potentially hurting Ellie.

I really hadn’t considered how I was going to feel.

I thought I was going to feel like shit.





Thirteen





Ellie

March





On a scale of one to ten, it was a full-on ten. Possibly maybe ten and a half.

Except I never do this. I never break the scale because I think it makes the scale invalid. Then any number is acceptable and representative of being bad or good.

What’s the difference between eleven and a thousand, really?

But for the first time, this seemed to warrant it.

Remember my obsession with the weather? I had started to ease up once we rolled into March. The worst cold should have been behind us.

They called this an anomaly. A major Arctic air mass that moved down over the Rockies with virtually no warning.

Right now the temperature was twenty below freezing, and it was snowing hard. The wind gusts were brutal. I couldn’t feel my hands despite being covered with heavy work gloves. I couldn’t see the house from the barn. I couldn’t see the pen from the barn, where Jake was working to save the calves.

All I knew was that this was bad. Because according to every prediction we’d gotten before the satellite kicked out, it was supposed to get worse.

Which made this storm on a scale of one to ten a full-on ten. And maybe a half.

I tried to focus on my work. I needed to put blankets on Petunia and Wyatt, make sure they had plenty of food. I had to thaw the trough water with boiling water I had hauled from the house to break up the ice so they could drink it. This would have to be done throughout the day and night as the water started to freeze almost immediately.

Of course, not realizing what was coming, Javier and Gomez had left before the storm. While their help would have been huge, we also didn’t have to worry about the generator powering the house and the bunk house.

All we had to do was make sure we could keep the calves as warm as possible. Which meant moving them from the pen to the barn. As many as we could fit. Jake knew from past storms the barn could hold about thirty.